Storage has been on a decades-long march toward ever-greater complexity. As your needs changed, storage technologies slowly emerged in reaction. The complexity of managing and reconfiguring the arrays and the difficulty of migrating data too often acted as a brake, retarding adaptation to new business conditions.
Today, Hitachi Vantara takes bold steps to flip that script. We have reimagined storage as enabling technology, an accelerating force that anticipates your changing business requirements rather than forever having to catch up. The result is storage that, by design, allows you to pursue goals with the confidence that the storage technology is ready for future opportunities.
With our latest storage portfolio announcement, Hitachi Vantara positions storage as an enabler of your digital transformation goals and cloud-adoption mandates no matter of size or industry. Our entire storage portfolio is designed for speed. Unlike in the past when speed was just about numbers, speed today gives you the inherent flexibility necessary to adapt to ever-changing requirements immediately.
The decisions Hitachi Vantara has taken with its storage architectures allow for the design of arrays that are highly optimized to deliver different capabilities and support divergent needs. While we offer various storage architectures, the entire portfolio shares a common operating system that speaks to the requirements of every storage scenario.
This is a first for the world of storage. It is similar to what is happening in transportation, where we see the emergence of electric cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles, all making use of a common battery design. We’ve designed each solution to meet the needs of a particular requirement, but all are driven by a common operating system for increased efficiency.
The latest Hitachi Vantara storage portfolio features multiple products with a shared strategy and approach. In the following sections, I will provide a brief introduction to our new storage tiers and highlight what makes them each unique…and the same.
Innovative Enterprise Storage without sacrificing reliability
For years, enterprise storage has been seen as your business’s crown jewel. These top-of-the-line storage arrays were expected to deliver the highest performance, massive scale, and unshakeable reliability. But Enterprise storage could be complex, and immutable.
There is much to be admired about enterprise storage and many characteristics worth carrying forward; we must continue to offer various price and performance tiers. The hottest data must be served up in huge volumes in an instant. But other classes of data should be stored in the same array, trading some performance for price.
Hitachi Vantara’s new enterprise storage architecture enables data consumption with better efficiency, enhanced data reduction, and improved system performance for several tiers based on different technologies. And, it does it all without sacrificing the trust, which has long made us the enterprise storage solution of choice.
We’ve embraced new storage options such as hyper-low latency NVMe over fabric options while enabling them to function side-by-side with legacy storage that can continue to deliver tremendous value for years. Now it is easy to use the fastest NVMe storage to support VMWare and transactional OLTP, SAS-based flash drives to support slower workloads such as SAP, and even virtualized storage for low-cost, high capacity, or public cloud connectivity.
How you acquire technology has changed. So have we. The new HV enterprise storage will offer cloud-like flexible consumption and pay-as-you-use options to match.
Proper nondisruptive, data-in-place upgrades using multi-controller storage arrays deliver peace of mind that enterprise storage will be effortlessly upgradeable far into the future without massive rip and replace hardware upgrades. Instead of the brutal planning and complex replacement cycles, today’s storage architecture normalizes evolution and embraces change. And rather than add complexity, analytics, machine learning, and automation make storage management easier and more predictable, enabling you to do more with less.
Midrange Storage with far-reaching potential
The lines differentiating enterprise and mid-range storage have blurred in a data-driven world. We all need performance, reliability, and availability to grow and succeed. The only meaningful difference is scale.
That’s why today’s Hitachi Vantara midrange storage architecture starts with our enterprise operating system to deliver levels of performance and availability as its starting point. It is not a different product. It is simply Hitachi Vantara’s world-class reliability shaped to be more affordable and accessible.
As you and your team become more focused on driving business growth, we have put ease-of-use at the forefront of our midrange solutions. Increasing simplicity through automation and artificial intelligence not only enhances reliability but enables you to support changing needs without specialist qualifications.
While our world is changing quickly, your budgets may not. Our new midrange solutions extend support for reliable hard drive technologies that make it possible to expand on-premise storage at prices that approach public cloud offerings with the added assurance of 8-Nines availability, unmatched by any cloud service. Even better, the latest deduplication and compression technologies apply equally to old and new media, bringing legacy drive technology forward to meet today’s requirements.
Object Storage to supported unstructured data everywhere
It is one thing to say that data is driving your decision-making. It is quite another to store vast quantities of unstructured data in a way that makes it accessible and usable. Object storage was previously deep, dark, and cold.
Hitachi Vantara’s object storage brings that data to life to drive applications that can help grow your business. We’re making it possible to provide object storage for any application, whether an ISV product, in-house developments, or cloud services, to channel the right data to where it can do the greatest good.
This is no one-size-fits-all object storage solution. Object storage adapts to many different business needs. Performance is optimized for specific use cases, whether that cloud-native applications, ingest for high-performance AI/ML use, or scaling data services for specialized workloads. Smart load-balancing ensures that unexpected outages or activity surges are elegantly handled.
Remote Operations to drive greater-than-cloud speed and resiliency
The cloud has reshaped our relationship with technology. We all expect to acquire, pay for, and interact with services whenever and wherever we need them. The developer whipping up an app on Monday afternoon to address a new business opportunity can’t wait a month for IT to provide storage resources. They’ll just sneak off to the public cloud.
Combining new automation technology with Hitachi Vantara’s legendary resiliency makes cloud-like simplicity possible within any business environment. Service-level templates provision storage resources as needed directly by the end user, without you ever seeing the request. Our new arrays use automation and analytics to allocate the right resources and guarantee the appropriate SLA. This makes it possible for you to empower your users while also protecting data compliance requirements and keeping data online all the time. AI and machine learning provide real-time monitoring throughout to anticipate and resolve issues and increase performance without increasing your workload.
FINAL THOUGHT
The bottom line is, today’s world is different, and storage must evolve along with it. Change is now the default state as digital transformation realigns your business around data. Infrastructure is no longer a place; it’s a hybrid of on-premise and cloud-based services that must act as one to support a workforce that is migrating out of the office to…everywhere. How you store data will be one of the determining factors of success in this new world. Hitachi Vantara is excited to provide the innovation needed for your future.